Cooper’s–A Neighborhood Eatery Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Craig Fass and Mandy Franklin, the owners of Menagerie, have reopened as COOPER’S–A NEIGHBORHOOD EATERY, a considerably more casual place with the same commitment to fresh, seasonal fare. A few Menagerie-era dishes remain on the menu, such as a mushroom tart–still delicious, with a buttery pastry shell–and grilled flank steak, but now equal billing is given to panini-style sandwiches and exotic pizzas like a duck-confit-and-pesto combo....

Antonio Carreno Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Abstract art often offers the mind freedom, as mysterious forms encourage the viewer to embark on an imaginative journey. And Antonio Carreno’s 12 seductive paintings at G.R. N’Namdi do invite the spectator “to create his own interpretation,” as the artist himself has said. The soft-edged, earth-colored, often rectangular shapes of Aparici–n certainly don’t suggest particular objects or meanings, and there’s a wonderful lyricism to the way these “veils of color,” in Carreno’s words, flow together....

Maloney named the drink the Golden Age, after the abandoned Colorado gold mine on whose grounds he was raised, and gave it a place among the 31 new and classic cocktails on the Violet Hour’s summer menu. It’s a tall, icy, sunset-colored potion of amber Brugal Anejo rum, cherry Heering, lemon bitters, and an egg yolk for body and a silky mouth feel. “I was really set on having an egg-yolk drink on the menu because it’s not been done before very often,” he says....

Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda explore possible morning-after cures in this goofy, unflinching lecture-cum-performance about the unpleasant consequences of the bibulous life. Self-loathing prose from John Cheever and Charles Bukowski–two monumental drinker-writers at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum–is intertwined with tales of the writer-performers’ experiments in thwarting a hungover “poor sense of well-being” (quite unlike the “false sense of well-being” that gets an overimbiber in trouble). Cures involve cabbage, Pedialyte, sex, and various combinations of chorizo and eggs; audience-participation bits are rewarded with free drinks....

Some musicians live to show off their chops, making sure you’re always aware of just how tricky the tricky parts are. But the guys in Brooklyn’s Dub Is a Weapon don’t seem to care a whit about impressing anyone. They come from a sprawling scene of overlapping funky New York bands (Antibalas, Fu-Arkist-Ra, Fire of Space) that are in it for the jams–they pack too many bodies onstage to support a lot of ego....

Talk about masters! Each evening in the Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s final weekend features a different tapper with decades of dancing under his belt. Harold Cromer, who performs Friday, was born in the early 20s. He started dancing when he was nine, winning contests at clubs where the prizes were bags of groceries, and went on to sing and dance on Broadway and on TV. Skip Cunningham, who performs Saturday, is another old-time hoofer and singer....

Lead Stories In December the sheriff’s office in Galveston, Texas, admitted that Louis Radzieski, 20, had escaped from lockup by simply walking out the front door. According to Sheriff Gean Leonard, Radzieski crouched behind a woman being legitimately released and remained in step with her as she passed the two officers at the booking desk. And in January in a Miami courtroom, while a prosecutor in the case of Raymond Jessi Snyder demanded that Snyder be incarcerated prior to sentencing because his record indicated he was a “flight risk,” Snyder slowly eased from his seat and bolted out the door....

Lead Story Paul Zellerbach, a judge in Riverside County, California, was publicly admonished by a state board in August for an incident from October 2004 in which, with a jury in its second day of deliberations in a murder trial, he left the courthouse to attend an afternoon playoff game between the Los Angeles Angels and the Boston Red Sox. When his clerk called at 2:30 to tell him the jury had reached a verdict, Zellerbach didn’t immediately return the call; the clerk therefore arranged to have another judge handle it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday 12th Ward alderman George Cardenas pitched the idea of taxing sales of bottled water. Not surprisingly, Mayor Daley spoke up for the idea at a press conference today–Cardenas rarely moves in public without checking with the mayor. And there’s a clear advantage for Daley to having one of his surrogates float the proposal: this way, if the idea sinks–as it almost certainly will–he doesn’t have to look bad....

For the past several years Cook County Board commissioners have been promoting themselves as fearless reformers protecting the beleaguered property tax payer by taking bold stands against former board president John Stroger. It’s left to the county commissioners to take a stand. Why them? To understand the answer you have to know a little about how TIFs work–don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief. TIFs are districts where property taxes flowing to taxing bodies such as the schools, parks, and county are frozen....

This revue is more often about men than about women–most of the 61 song excerpts revolve around men that done women wrong or the tricks women use to get a man. Writer (and original solo performer) Dorothy Marcic provides a good dose of humor and some nods to female empowerment: Gloria Gaynor’s disco hit “I Will Survive” is sung twice, along with the chorus of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” But Marcic should have stuck to personal memoir instead of expanding the piece to include a century of women’s history from corsets to Britney, especially since she essentially passes over suffrage and most other feminist movements....

William Betts’s ten paintings at Peter Miller were made by machine using pixel-high slices he chose from his digital photographs. In most cases he began with images of nature. “I’m attracted to gardens–to the formality of their intersection between man and nature,” he says. Threshold and Bird’s Eye View were made from photos of the same irrigated field in France “taken at different times of day so you have different kinds of light....

“Abyss” is right. Angus MacLachlan’s exercise in pointless unpleasantness opens with a couple in the throes of an office quickie, then devolves into a mushy stew of sexual jealousy, low-rent intrigue, and religious and ethnic intolerance. Histrionic, brassy real estate agent Erin finds the off-brand church that’s moved next to her office in a minimall distasteful, presumably because of some abuse she suffered in the past. She enlists her security guard/lover and his sweet live-in girlfriend in a scheme to somehow “send a message” to the church folks....

This weekend Grant Park hosts the free Viva! Chicago Latin Music Festival, which features some 20-odd acts, but this three-band Latin-music bill at Ravinia demolishes that whole event. I don’t know of a better contemporary New York salsa group than the one led by trombonist JIMMY BOSCH; on his most recent album, 2004’s El Avion de la Salsa (JRG), he relentlessly stokes the dance floor while still making room for killer improvisation....

In 1971 Malachi Favors (who sometimes went by Maghostut, a Coptic word meaning “I am your host”) told writer Val Wilmer, “If the cosmics didn’t lead me, I would be in some lounge making two or three hundred dollars a week, playing tunes. Many times I’d like to go back because this is a difficult road.” But Favors stayed the course until his death in January at age 76, imparting spirituality, ironic humor, and consummate musicianship to a host of free-jazz groups....

All I really wanted to do last weekend was stay home and listen to 97.1, the Drive, because they were hosting two days of “deep tracks”–lesser-known songs off regularly played classic-rock albums, or, as a friend put it, “music that reminds you of your dad on cocaine”–to promote their brand-new Internet-only radio station (WDRV.com), which plays all deep tracks all the time. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Finally I checked this very paper’s listings and found out about a release party happening Friday night at Bucket Rider Gallery for Art Prostitute, an elegant magazine based in Denton, Texas, whose mission is to get young people interested in collecting art....

Chicago Public Library Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can get more with your Chicago Public Library card than just the latest Stephen King. For example, each branch library offers a limited number of Great Kids Museum Passports–passes good for general admission to ten local museums, including the heavy hitters on the lake. Despite the name, only adults can check out the passes (one per person), and they can be used by both adults and children....

We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers (Flameshovel), CHIN UP CHIN UP’s full-length debut, was one of the best local releases of 2004, and I’m grateful the band committed to recording it. Anybody would have understood if they’d called it a day after February 14, 2004, when bassist Chris Saathoff was killed by a hit-and-run driver; instead they made the album using Saathoff’s bass parts from demos on four of the tracks....

Slacker antihero Chris Elliott put himself on the pop-culture map with recurring appearances on Late Night With David Letterman, starring roles in Get a Life and Cabin Boy, and his buddy/villain turn in There’s Something About Mary. But he’s been a writer from the get-go–for Late Night and SNL in addition to his own vehicles–which gives his stab at celebrity authorship a little more credibility than most. On its surface The Shroud of the Thwacker (Miramax Books) is the unholy spawn of Gideon Defoe (The Pirates!...

GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (TWELVE BOOKS) Hitchens’s slashing polemic sets the stage for Lilla’s more measured account of how religion and politics resumed their combustible union after Hobbes tried to break them up. Hitchens shows why Lilla’s sometimes convoluted history matters; Lilla shows why Hitchens’s arguments so often fall on deaf ears. Hitchens hasn’t exactly been the flavor of the month since he came out in favor of the Iraq war (which he has called “a critical front in a much wider struggle against a vicious totalitarian ideology”)....